gialloshots

I bought this book about a year ago and it can be a little tough to get through. I've emailed Mr. Koven a few times and he's a nice enough guy. It's just a very, very in-depth book on the subject from an academic viewpoint so it can be dry.

However, since I collect Italian film posters I enjoyed the descriptions of movie distribution and the general film scene during that time.

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ddmichael

I read this book a couple of years ago, though I can't actually remember ever having finished it, and as a former film studies student it just bought back horrible memories of reading a lot of pseudo-intellectual crap, which took an entire chapter to make a point easily distillable to a single sentence. I'm sure that Mr Koven is a nice enough fellow, and he's certainly seen most of the important genre entries, but at the end of the day the book takes a very long time to say very little - basically that the films were aimed at people with short attention spans, and so there had to be a killing or a bit of t&a every ten minutes - without actually looking at whether the films are any good (he makes it clear in the intro that it's not a critical piece) and have managed to transcend their roots. Pity, because I could definitely have dusted off the old film studies vocab book and settled in for a good read had he critically analyzed the films themselves. Plus, it's full of spoilers, so beware...